#202 - We started a new Instagram account and this is what happened

Hello, hello, guys, it is Kate here from hello Funnels, and welcome back to the Doing It Online podcast. Now, if you have an Instagram account, you've probably thought to yourself, particularly recently, like, man, I want to just throw this in the bin. I want to throw it out the window. I'm sick of it. I'm jack of it. And maybe if I just started again, it would be easier, right? Like, and we probably all seen those people. I know, I definitely did. Since people shouting about how old accounts are dead, the algorithm is punishing them and you actually can get some crazy, crazy growth if you start from scratch. So you know what we decided to give it a go at? In this episode, I'm going to break down exactly how it's going, what we did, and our thoughts and takeaways after 30 days of starting our Instagram completely from scratch. So let's dive in.

Okay, guys. So I feel like I came up with this idea at the end of last year and it was after having spent a good 12 plus months where we had been trying to revive our Instagram account. Now, a few things to know about Instagram account. Firstly, it's really old. I actually should have looked up how old it is, but it's probably over 10 years old. It was originally started for my previous business, which was helping people with secret bloggers business. So it was originally started and a lot of that initial growth was from people who were interested in blogging. So when I changed businesses, I decided that it's going to still be some people in that audience who are interested in online courses and funnels and marketing. So I decided not to start again then, but to just rebrand the account and shift my focus. And you know, my assumption was that people, if they weren't interested, they would self select out. Unfortunately, what I think happened is they self selected out by no longer engaging. Um, so what that meant was that they didn't unfollow us, which is why I thought they would do. But they just stopped engaging and then the algorithm kind of, you know, picked up on their vibe and just stopped showing them our content. So what that meant was that even though we had 24,000 followers and we've had about 24,000 followers for years, like that number is like one in, one out kind of thing. Our engagement was terrible. Like, it was really, really bad. You might get like three likes on a post. I'm like, how can 24,000 people be seeing. Obviously they're not seeing it. That's a problem. But you know, how can you have Three people, like something that was, we thought was like really great value. So we tried lots and lots of strategies to try and reinvigorate the previous account. None of them were working. And I'd had a couple of friends and people that I'd worked with who were really, really into the social media space and they're like, look, you might actually find it easier to start from scratch. And I didn't want to. So they've been telling this for more than two years. I'm like, I don't want to do that. I don't want to go back to having an account with like zero. Doesn't it look bad as a brand? Like, we've been around for a really long time when people think we're a spammer if we've only got like two followers. Like, all of that stuff went through my mind, but by the end of last year I was like, I'm just jack of it. Why not? Let's try, like, let's make 2024 the year of just trying shit out and let's see what happens. Like, particularly when, as far as I was concerned, there wasn't really a bad outcome here. It wasn't like throwing out something that was working well for us. It was something that we were spending a lot of time and effort creating content and all that stuff and it really wasn't doing that much for us. So I'm like, well, if we're going to be doing the effort anyway, why not try again? So the idea was to basically try out a brand new account, like starting account literally from 0 for 90 days and go hard, go all in and see if we can get more traction, more growth, like start seeing the numbers going in the right direction and have that at the end of the 90 days be enough that this actual new account was supporting us and working for us better than our old account. If it doesn't, then, you know, no harm, no foul, we'll just go back to using the old account. Right? Like, that was kind of my thesis. I'm like, at the end of the day, there's no danger here, right? So that's what we did. And we're currently 30 days in. And I always want to give you a little bit of a check in to see how it's going. So first of all, I'll let me walk you through what it is that we're doing. Like the strategy that we decided on to try and get this account moving. So we've gone with reels very heavily, so we decided to do it two reels a day for the whole 90 days, which is a lot. So we actually prepped for this. Like we actually didn't post at all on Instagram for about four weeks, which possibly wasn't the best. But you know, we had to. You gotta take your resources from somewhere, right? Can't just pull extra hours out of the day. And also Keely, the lovely woman on my team who helps me out with social media, she just had twins. So we're like, we don't have a extra, extra time right now. So we took four weeks off and use that four weeks to batch a lot of stuff and kind of get as pre prepared as we could so that we were going into this 90 days. Not like being like every day like, oh, I've got to do two reels today. I've got to do two reals today. Like I wanted to make sure that we had stuff that was batched and schedulable. That was one of my caveats. I'm like, I'm not doing anything live because I hate it and I won't remember to do it. I'll put it off. Like this needs to be. You tell me 20 shots that you need me go on film. I will do that once a month. And then it needs to be something that is as hands off as possible or that can be sit down a day and get it all done and get it all scheduled out. So that was, you know, the big caveat. Cause I knew if it was relying on me to just do it live, it would never happen. I'd be do it for like three days and then I would just would stop. I just know myself too well here, right? So I mean, and that's what we get to do with business. If you're someone who is thinking about doing this and you don't have a team, then you know you can replicate it yourself. If you're not a person who loves showing up live, I know some people find it easy to do live. They put a reminder in their phone. Other people like, nah, you know, again, I will lose interest after a few days. So let's sit down. You can batch a bunch of these out, particularly with the second part of this where I was like, let's make this as easy as possible for ourselves and let's utilize what we've got. All right, so let's go back through and grab out all the captions for old posts that did well. Let's reuse any reels that we've done previously. Let's use Chat GPT where we can let's go through old emails and turn emails into captions because I knew the captions was really probably going to be the most time consuming part. So we did a big call, a big collection of assets that we could potentially reuse and we put it all into airtable. We've got this really cool air table sort of view set up to help us like our planning and see, you know, what's being worked on, be able to review it visually and stuff. Airtable is like my favorite for doing social media stuff like that. So that was the plan. All right, so we've done that now for 30 days and we definitely have not gone viral time. We've got a whole whopping 183 followers so far and that is after with our list sharing a couple of posts back over onto the original account as well. And so that was the first thing that surprised me because my assumption was I was like, well we'll get our first few hundred, maybe even like a thousand people from our existing list pretty easily, right? Like we won't be stuck in the little, tiny, tiny numbers for too long. The people who are the ones following us already, surely they'll come over. So I was quite surprised, not saying I'm offended guys at all. No, just kidding. But you know, I was quite surprised of how few people from a previous account came across. Like we're getting a lot of new people now and again, fine, that's great. We are going to sort of start looking at some strategies going forward for how we can try and particularly if we're intending to keep this account, how we can make sure we are getting more and more of the people over. The other thing I thought was interesting that with the smaller account like I was waiting for like a bit of the blowback of any of these new people coming across because like I said, I thought the first however many people who came on would be existing subscribers and I think like the first 20 definitely were or followers. Sorry, I'm always thinking about emails. So I say subscribers and followers and you know, obviously they would be familiar with us and you know, as long as we explain what we're doing, they'd be fine with it. But we're getting a lot of people who don't still only 183 but majority of people are actually finding us new, finding us from our real. Which you know, kind of verifies that yes, that strategy does work to get in front of new people and interestingly they're sending me a lot more dms so we wouldn't really get many dms, unless you sort of had, you know, like a many chat funnel, like, hey, DM us to get this free thing. Like that's when we would get DMS before, but now people are like, oh, thank you so much for sharing this. This is really valuable. I just wanted to say keep doing like, you know, they're like encouraging us because I guess because we're like a small account, I'm like, that's really nice. Like, not sad about that at all. And the other thing. So I said like, we're 30 days in, we haven't gone viral or anything yet. Our growth is still very small, but our reach and this is the thing that I think is really interesting and exciting, our reach. So as far as like the number of plays and stuff we're getting on our reels is on average around about 50% to 30% on our new account of what we would have got on our old account. So old account, 24,000 followers, we would get between like 3, 300 to 2000 plays. On a real new account, we're getting between like 200 and 400 probably on average. And that's with 183 followers. So I mean, I know there's lots of other stats to dive into, but this life was the easiest one for us to be. Like comparing apples to apples and giving us that first indication that, yeah, the new account is actually, the algorithm is weighing it higher than the old account. Like, we're definitely being dragged down now. One thing I wanted to talk about because with the old account was one strategy that people said, oh, if you want to reinvigorate, it's kind of just a little sidebar. You want to reinvigorate your old account, what you need to do is go through and delete your old followers who are no longer active. Like your ghost followers. I'm like, and that you have to do manually. I'm like, we've got 24,000 of these things. This is not happening. So anyway, that's just as a little sidebar is another thing we weren't prepared to do on the old account. So from these initial stats, like I said, we haven't had like crazy, crazy follower growth or anything like that. So the next 30 days we are trying out some new strategies and we're really focusing on trying to create content that is something that people are going to share and save. So stuff that is really value based and stuff that is really focusing on things that are trending right now. So talking about things that are marketing strategies and Tactics that are trending right now, talking about like chat, GPT and AI and things like that. Really trying to tap into that so that we're getting more shares, more saves, we're getting in front of more of the right people. We're not really going all in on like, yes, we're using trending audios and things like that. And yes, we had. One of the posts we did was a Taylor Swift meme style post that was going around. And yes, it did get lot of views, but it didn't really get us any followers. And my theory is that for a business account sharing just like meme style stuff and trying to get a whole lot of Taylor Swift fans to see it is like, that's not my target market, right? Like, yes, that stuff can be fun and can get you more eyeballs, but are they going to be the right eyeballs? Like, I don't want to go viral for something that's completely irrelevant and just get a whole bunch of people who aren't my target market following me. I've had that happen before, before. Years and years ago with all business. One of our blog posts went viral. It was about skincare and went viral on Pinterest. And we were getting hundreds of thousands of visitors from Pinterest to this. But skincare was something we barely ever spoke about. And so we tried to like change everything and do more skincare content and tried to create online products and programs about skincare, but we weren't skincare experts and we didn't really care about skincare. And it was actually one just skincare. It was blackheads. Like it was something gross. So, you know, it was like, okay, now we get all this traffic. Our site kept crashing and it actually didn't actually benefit us at all. So I'm quite aware that if we are wanting to get picked up and start getting favored and shown in like the different parts of Instagram to new people, I want to make sure it's for the right reason and I want to make sure it's the right eyeballs. And we're not just getting followers for the sake of followers. We're definitely focusing on quality over quantity here. Although some quantity would be nice. So, yeah, so now we've had, you know, 30 days in. I can see that it's. The benefits are there. We're definitely going to continue with it. So we're going to focus on value content on do it. We're gonna do a few series of, you know, like seven days of this, 14 days of, you know, certain type of tips and see how that goes. And we're also gonna start taking some of the reels that perform the best. And we're going to because I am a big believer in working smarter, not harder. But we're gonna start also sharing them on as YouTube shorts and also onto Pinterest. And we're gonna see the impact that those that has on those accounts as well. Well, so that's update number one. We'll be back with more updates later on and you know, we'll be letting you know anything it does or doesn't work. And if you want to, of course to come and check out the new account, see what we're doing, be one of our first 200 followers, head on over. It's hellofunnels. Co.

Our old one is obviously at hellofunnels. So you can come on over, come be one of our first followers. We'll love you forever if you do. And you know, we'll be back with another update of how it's going in a couple of weeks. So that's it. Guys. I hope this has been super valuable. I hope you took some notes. If you did find it valuable. I would love, love, love it if you could share it with someone else in your world who you think would also get some use out of this. Otherwise, guys, we'll see you same time, same place next week by.